GenXJamerican

Lately, I’ve been getting e-mail at my Gmail account that are clearly intended for other people.  I thought “Scott” and “Lawrence” were fairly common names individually, but the number of people who believe that slawrence [at] gmail [dot] com belongs to them has grown to the point where it’s beginning to become inconvenient.

The e-mails that concern me the most are the ones that contain people’s travel information, passwords to certain websites, and cellphone bills.  Because they’re automatically e-mailed from these sites, I’m not sure what the best way is to contact these folks to have corrections made.

I welcome any suggestions readers (all 3 of you ;-)) might have on the best way to deal with this.

I picked up a white 16GB iPhone 3G on July 13.  After a month of use, I can add my 2 cents to the tons of reviews already out there.

Battery Life

I have to recharge the phone every two days, running with 3G and wi-fi off, except when I need them.  If I leave 3G on, I have to recharge the phone after a day.  From people I’ve talked to about other 3G phones, this amount of battery life is typical.

No Keyboard?  No Problem.

I’ve found that I can type with 2 thumbs reasonably quickly, even without the physical clicking of keys.  I can’t type as fast as I could on my old Nokia 6820, but it’s still usable.

The iPhone as a Phone

The only functionality obviously missing is support for MMS (picture mail).  It seems odd that phones AT&T gives away have a feature that the iPhone lacks, but that’s the situation.  While it isn’t a feature I want desperately to use (I barely used it on the Razr), having to surf to a website to receive MMS messages someone sent you is inconvenient.

I like everything else.  The recent call and voicemail features are particularly well-done.

The iPhone as a Web Browser

Browsing the web is where the iPhone really shines.  At this point, there’s no other device its size that enables you to surf the web so easily.  If you aren’t an AT&T wireless subscriber, this feature alone is probably one of the best reasons to buy an iPod touch.

While the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, I see this as a plus.  On my work and home machines, I use Firefox 3 with Flashblock enabled on virtually every site.  No worrying about ads, or video I don’t want, or the battery life penalty that would likely come with Flash support.

The iPhone as an iPod

Last week was the first time I used it much as an iPod (I was in Toronto).  As cool as the click wheel was on previous iPods, multi-touch crushes it.  I didn’t think navigating through a large music/video collection could get easier, but it is.  Watching videos on a screen that size isn’t bad at all.

E-mail on the iPhone

So far, I like this feature.  Occasionally, I’ll see a “This message has not been downloaded from the server” note, but that only happens with my Comcast e-mail account.

The Apps

I spent a lot of time playing JawBreaker when I was at Pearson International waiting for my flight home.  It’s an addictive little game.  Beyond that one, the apps I use most are NetNewsWire, Facebook, and Pandora.

Overall

I’m very pleased with it.  I’ve only gone traveling with it once so far (to Toronto for Agile 2008), and even though I had a laptop with me, I barely used it.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have left the laptop at home and simply synced the iPhone with my work e-mail.  It’s that capable and excellent a device.

This is probably old hat to XML experts, but it’s new to me–the default values of the minOccurs and maxOccurs attributes of <xs:element>…</xs:element> in XML schemas are both 1 (one).  I had a schema definition with minOccurs=“0” and no value for maxOccurs.  In order to get the behavior I assumed was the default, maxOccurs needed to be set to “unbounded”.

While working on some XSD validation code today, I found that I needed to load a couple of text files into strings to unit test. I’d forgotten how I’d done this before, but I googled the answer with this search term:

file to string .net

Update: Ed Poore let me know in a comment that the .NET Framework contains a method that does this already.  System.IO.File.ReadAllText(path)  does the same thing, so you can completely ignore the method above.

Finally upgraded to the latest version, so I figured I’d change themes too.  The upgrade process turned out to be far easier than I expected.  If I remembered any UNIX scripting from undergrad, I’d automate it.

I spent part of my Sunday running through the woods shooting at friends and strangers.  The place: Outdoor Adventures Paintball.  The occasion was a friend’s 29th birthday.  Paintball has changed quite a bit since I first tried it as a sophomore in college.  There are college and professional leagues now (my alma mater apparently has quite a good team).  There are corporate sponsors.  They even have TV coverage on ESPN2 and the Versus network.

For novices like us, it was a great time.  We teamed up against a group of what looked like undergrads from the University of Maryland.  In three rounds of matches (3 games per match),  we won each 2 games to 1.  Usually it was by killing all of them off, but at least a couple of times we captured their flag and moved it all the way down the field.  The “center flag” variant of the game (one flag midfield that a team must capture and move forward through their opponents) was our least favorite.  We had a really long field for it in the second match, and our strategy didn’t work that well at first.  The one thing I would differently the next time is buy more ammunition.  Even though you have to pull the trigger for each shot, I ran out of ammunition before our third match was over.

I saw this production of Macbeth this afternoon with my friends Jen and Alban.  We were rewarded for our wait in the freezing cold (for standing room tickets) with actual seats for the show.  Thanks to Alban (I owe you big for this one), yours truly got a front row seat to the show.  Directed and produced in large part by Teller (of Penn & Teller), it was anything but your typical Shakespeare production (if there is such a thing).  I’m no aficionado of magic, but they pulled some incredible tricks in this show.  People appeared and disappeared before our eyes.  We saw fake blood which looked uncomfortably real.  I knew we were in for quite a ride when the show began with a Folger Shakespeare Library staffer stabbed through the back while reading us an announcement from the stage.  This doesn’t even include the excellent acting, the great fight choreography, the sound effects and percussion.

Instead of management and code, I’ll just be writing code (at least for now). Today, I started a new job at a small consulting firm in Virginia with a software lab that wants to start putting out products.

Today consisted of the environment configuration and filling out of forms typical of a first day.  Most of the last half of the day was taken up by a boot camp.  I found it to be a very enlightening how-to on consulting, as well as an intro to the company’s culture.